History 138 - Class 11

History 138: Science in the U.S.

Class 11 (9/18)
Darwin's challenge

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Outline

19th-century geology (review)

The problem of speciation
Diversity and pattern
Cuvier: system
Lamarck: development

Darwin's account
The career of a young naturalist
Constructing the argument
Darwin's theory of transmutation, and its mechanism
What is revolutionary about the theory?

Teleology and historiography

Names and Terms

Primary	Secondary
speciation Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) Jean Baptiste de Lamarck (1744-1829) inheritance of acquired characteristics teleology Charles Darwin (1809-1882) HMS Beagle (1831-1836) biogeography On the Origin of Species (1859) natural selection upon chance variation struggle for existence	uniformitarianism vs. catastrophism neptunism vs. plutonism paleontology Cambrian explosion Thomas Malthus (1766-1834)

Assignment

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (London: John Murray, 1859), v-ix (table of contents).

What can you conclude about Darwin's argument from the sequence and construction of his chapters? What were the empirical bases of his argument?
What objections did he anticipate?
How did he present himself as a scientist?